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She and friends were headed to play at the community center in Morningside, better known in those days as the "Old Projects" or simply, "The Grove."

"I seen these cars pull up," she told a near-capacity audience at Bennett College's Pfeiffer Chapel. "I seen Caucasian men with rifles. I ran for my life."

Her voice, and others like hers, are essential to any dialogue about Nov. 3, but they are often lost in dueling rhetoric about communism and conspiracies and the city's precious image.

But the bloody confrontation between a KKK caravan and communist protesters happened in someone's neighborhood. Jackie Clapp's neighborhood. It happened in a place with children and families. Like yours and mine.

Someone often asks, during discussions of Nov. 3, how we might feel if the ugliest minute and one-half of violence in Greensboro's history had occurred at a ritzier address. What if that armed caravan had come cruising down a leafy avenue in Irving Park, wrote the authors of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission's new report on the legacy of Nov. 3.

Would the neighborhood have become the faceless backdrop that Morningside Homes became? Would the residents have amounted only to bit players in history, as most in Morningside became over the years?
We've been arguing about Nov. 3, 1979, since Nov. 3, 1979. But one Truth is self-evident: The poor were marginalized then and they're similarly marginalized now.

They were marginalized by the Communist Workers Party, which blithely placed them in harm's way by staging a "Death to the Klan" rally on their doorsteps and by inviting the Klan, in so many words, to bring it on.

They were marginalized by city leaders more obsessed with damage control than compassion.

They were marginalized by the police, whose ineptitude in 1979 was dramatic and inexcusable.

The carnage could have been even worse, if not for the grace of God, and a split-second of mercy on one shooter's part. Recounts Elizabeth Wheaton, in her book on Nov. 3, "Codename: Greenkil": "Yelling, 'Shoot the niggers,' [19-year-old Klansman Mark] Sherer took aim at a couple of black figures on the corner of Everitt. They were children. Frozen in their tracks. Crying."

Sherer fired only a warning shot.

Twenty-seven years later, Jackie Clapp still remembers, but does anyone care? Race and class remain major issues in the community and surface time and again during discussions of education, the minimum wage, public transportation, housing and so on.

"Our community was traumatized by this," Clapp said Thursday night. "We suppressed it and we moved on."

No team of counselors descended on Morningside, no outpouring of community concern. There was, however, a strict curfew.

Why us? Clapp wondered then. Why here? "I hadn't done nothing to the Ku Klux Klan." Nor had she as a child chosen to be poor. Or black.

"If I had a choice," she joked, "I'd be blue. I love blue." And in a sad way, she is.

"When something like this happens, and you don't get to talk about it, ... it does something to you as a young child," she said.

Now Morningside is gone, razed and reborn as a kinder, gentler place with picket fences and front porches. "But our hearts, our spirits are still roaming that land," Jackie Clapp said.